A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on September 8, 2024 by Revd Dr Sam Wells
Reading for address: Mark 7: 27-37
My mother was a mild-mannered woman not given to strong dislikes. But one person that always caused her to snarl at the television in the early seventies was the Democratic Unionist politician and Free Presbyterian minister the Revd Ian Paisley. One joke that used to make her laugh was about an Eastern Orthodox Northern Irishwoman who died and went to the pearly gates. St Peter had a quiet day, so he took the woman on a tour round the Northern Irish section of heaven. He said, ‘Here are the Catholics… and here are the Protestants. They’ve somehow found a way to get along in the end.’ But then he took the woman for quite a long walk, at the end of which he warned her to be quiet and started to tiptoe. The woman asked, ‘Why all the hush-hush?’ St Peter whispered back, ‘We’re just passing Ian Paisley and his people. They think they’re the only ones here.’
This tendency – to take something that’s a gift to everyone and assume it’s a possession belonging only to oneself – is probably a universal human phenomenon. But it’s an especially problematic syndrome for those whose faith is shaped by the Bible. I want to suggest to you today that the Bible has two contrasting dynamics – one in which the story is always about Israel, and everyone else is a bit part in Israel’s story, and the other in which God’s mercy stretches wider still and wider, like the wideness of the sea. I want to point out how today’s gospel reading is the moment when the balance fundamentally shifts between the narrow dynamic and the wide one.
You may have followed the recent story about the 12-year-old boy who was prosecuted for his role in last month’s riots. His mother missed her son’s trial because she was on holiday in Ibiza. It raised a question we often encounter of whether parenthood is simply a biological fact or if it implies a moral role. I’m sure we all know people who can point to a relative or mentor or family friend and say, ‘They’re more like my parents than my birth parents are.’ There’s a similar dynamic going on throughout the Old Testament, about whether Israel’s special status before God is a birthright or a moral role, and how individual foreigners or even other nations can occasionally reflect God’s character and purpose better than Israel does.
Sometimes when there’s an enquiry after a public tragedy like Grenfell, or into a public issue like an additional runway at Heathrow, the committee can’t reach a unanimous position. In those circumstances it may issue a majority report that represents its considered view and a minority report that airs the very different convictions of irreconcilable members of the group. The Old Testament has a majority and minority report. The majority report is one of a people chosen by God, that survives by wit and wile, is transformed by miracle and wonder, depends on God’s providence, grows to great power, flounders in unfaithfulness and languishes in exile, before returning to the semi-dignified state we find in Jesus’ time. But the minority report goes like this. God chooses Abraham, liberates and legislates under Moses, and brings Israel into the Promised Land. Yet time after time Israel is challenged, saved, inspired, moved, humbled, and renewed by people from beyond its bounds – by outcasts, by enemies, by gentiles.
If we go back to the story of the woman at the pearly gates finding that Ian Paisley and friends thought in heaven they were the only ones there, we could say the majority report of the Old Testament is an Ian Paisley story, where Israel thought, ‘This story is all about us’; while the minority report is what the Orthodox woman discovers – that there’s room in heaven for everyone. But here’s the crucial point: the Old Testament is written by people who assumed the majority report. Yet it was largely compiled when Israel was exiled in Babylon, in other words at a time when Israel was discovering the wondrous truth that God seemed to be at work through people other than just the Jews.
When we turn to the New Testament, we see the ways in which the minority report starts to take over. But what we mustn’t do is assume that was a formality. You can’t understand the New Testament unless you appreciate that overturning the majority report (that the story was always only about Israel) was a radical, remarkable, shocking thing to do. It’s so revolutionary that it still takes 15 out of the 28 chapters of the Acts of the Apostles for the same transformation to happen, and that’s long after Jesus’ resurrection and Pentecost. Remember in Luke’s gospel, when Jesus preaches his sermon about bringing good news to the poor, the local people become so furious they almost throw him off a cliff. Why? Because he reminds them that their beloved prophet Elijah came to a widow in Sidon, which is not in Israel, and their cherished prophet Elisha healed a leper from Syria, another gentile. In other words, because Jesus backs the minority report.
And this is why I suggest today’s passage from Mark’s gospel marks the decisive turning of the tide. Because what do we have here but two stories, one set in Sidon, like the Elijah story, and the other featuring a Syrian, like the Elisha story. Let me describe how, with a mixture of symbolism and irony, Mark displays the transformation of Israel’s story from the majority to the minority report.
In the story of the Syrophoenician woman Mark gives us several signals we’re talking about a total outsider. She’s a gentile, she’s a woman, she seems to have no man around, her daughter’s a minor, and her daughter has a demon. Five kinds of unthinkable. And there’s a sixth and seventh kind: the woman behaves outrageously by approaching Jesus, a man, and by kneeling at his feet, where feet are a euphemism for nether regions. Jesus’ reaction is textbook majority report: ‘Look, sunshine, I’m not being funny or anything, but the story’s just about Israel.’ Mark’s not saying Jesus is mean and smallminded: he’s portraying Jesus as the embodiment of Israel, in the form of the majority report. But what does the woman do? She wittily, charmingly, compellingly and irresistibly articulates the minority report, by saying, ‘Even if you’re going to insult and demean and humiliate me, don’t you see how you’re still tacitly acknowledging there’s a place for me in this story.’ And in that one second the whole dominance of the majority report is overturned, and the truth of the minority report prevails. It’s as if suddenly, astonishingly, miraculously, Israel can for the first time truly hear what God is really saying and articulate it in its own voice.
Funny that – because straightaway we have a story about someone who for the first time hears what other people are really saying and speaks in his own voice. This time it’s not Jesus but the man who represents Israel. There’s a profound irony that Israel’s represented by a gentile; and another irony that Jesus transgresses the purity practices so integral to the Jewish law by spitting and touching the man’s tongue. But what the story displays is how through perceiving God working in the life of the gentiles and by being prepared to trespass away from time-honoured customs, Israel can, in this Jesus moment, hear God’s voice and speak God’s truth. And in case we might miss the significance of this symbolic action, in today’s Old Testament lesson from Isaiah we read the great anticipation of the messianic age in which the opening of the ears of the hearing-impaired is no idle miracle but an announcement that Israel’s dry season is over. Of course the majority report reads this passage as the reassertion of David’s kingship. But we’re now in minority report territory, where this prophecy is showing that God’s ultimate purpose is for all peoples to be drawn into the process of making Israel’s desert bloom. And in case we miss how fundamental a moment this is, look at the last line of the story – ‘He has done everything well’ – echoing the words in the creation story – ‘God saw that it was good.’ It’s up there with creation. It’s that important.
Now you may say, ‘This is all very interesting, and it’s great to see how the subtleties of this gospel passage are Mark’s way of transforming his reader’s imagination to grasp what he portrays as God’s unfolding purpose – but we in our wisdom can perceive as God’s purpose all along.’ But if we stop there, we’ve missed the painful, ironic, agonising tragedy about this story and this widening mercy. Prepare yourself for a terrible realisation: for most of its history, and even today – in some respects especially today – the church has ignored today’s passage and backed its own version of the Old Testament’s majority report. Rather than see its life, its growth, its energy, its gospel in the ever-greater embrace of all God’s people and the whole of God’s creation in God’s glorious realm of belonging and togetherness, it’s been like Ian Paisley and said, ‘This story is only about us.’ And it’s seen fit to exclude people just as readily as ancient Israel did, by creating its own set of gentiles whom it deemed to fall outside its self-imposed boundaries of class and race and sexuality and disability and gender. Today’s gospel isn’t a clever and affirming story of something we already knew – that Jesus turned Israel’s absorption with itself into the Holy Spirit’s embrace of all, everywhere, forever. It’s a confrontational, prophetic, abrasive, unmistakeable, arresting demand that the church live into the minority report that Jesus advocates and embodies.
Let me put it in unambiguous terms. One afternoon, among gentiles, with a distressed and ill-mannered woman and a disabled and unclean man, Jesus showed the church for all time that no one lies outside the wideness of God’s mercy. No one. No one. No one. No one. Jesus says two simple words to that excluded man. They’re the only two words he speaks in this part of the story. He says these words to the Israel of his time. He says these words to the Christians who wrote the New Testament. He is saying these words to the church this very day, in the midst of our obsession with defining our own holiness by excluding those we choose to turn into gentiles and regard as unclean. These are the two words: ‘Be opened.’
And what these two words mean is obvious if you realise this passage is about turning from the majority to the minority report. It shouldn’t need explaining to anyone who believes the New Testament tells how the wideness of God’s mercy, which was always God’s purpose, is finally unfolded in Jesus. It should go without saying for anyone who actually thinks the story about Ian Paisley thinking he’s the only one there in heaven is actually funny because it’s so absurd. But the tragic, horrifying, bewildering, confounding truth of our time is that it does need saying. The most influential part of our church today seems to have forgotten or ignored it and reinstated the majority report, simply replacing Israel with the church, inserting one set of exclusionary boundaries in place of another, replicating Ian Paisley with itself.
So I’m going speak the truth of today’s gospel as simply as I know how. Be opened to the way the Spirit humbles God’s people by the renewal that comes through those we attempt to exclude. Be opened to the constant, consistent call of the Spirit to see what new things God is doing among us. Be opened to realise that, just because something has been a social convention and a church assumption for generations or centuries, that doesn’t mean it represents the true purpose of God or the leading of the Spirit for us today. Be opened to the wideness of God’s mercy, lest we find ourselves, to our own consternation, outside it. Be opened, and experience the transformation the Father intends, Christ brings, and the Spirit is activating.
Be opened to the embrace of the eternal realm of God, where no one is excluded, and all partake of the crumbs of the communion banquet. Be opened to the heart of God.
